Interesting but flawed

Rating: 5/10 (11 March 2008)

Michael Bay usually achieves high grosses on films that are rejected by critics and most moviegoers of good taste. Richard Roeper called Bad Boys II the worst picture of the decade. Therefore, it was kind of odd that this 2005 film turned out to be a little bit the opposite: It completely bombed at the box office, making for Bay's lowest film to date, yet it might have been his most interesting film.
"The Island" is a sci-fi film along the lines of Gattaca or I, Robot, set in some dystopian future, where the protagonist comes to the rescue of everything by transcending the limits of what the more rigidly stratified society places on him.
The story revolves around a futuristic factory that promises to prolong the lives of its clients through cloning the clinets and using the clones' organs for transplants. The clones live in this isolated world with implanted memories and the idea that there is no life outside of this world. They're made to perform tasks that lead to the operation of the factory, so that saves labor costs. The only salvation for the clones is the belief that they will be taken to a paradise called the island if they're selected in a lottery, but in reality when a clone wins the lottery, that means the client needs an organ and the clone is killed. Ewan MaGregor and Scarlett Johannson play two clones who somehow find out about this outside world and are on the lam from the people who run the factory because it's supposedly some sort of worst-case scenario if the clones should get out. Being a Michael Bay film, this is also an action film, and a great one at that.
While I'm a sucker for a good sci-fi film, and this is a fascinating concept, it seems like a flawed one as well. There seems to a complete ignorance of the fact that we've made a lot of progress in terms of harvesting replacement organs already that doesn't require building entire clones so there's a good chance a company like this could avoid all this morally gray area and the ensuing controversy. It seems as though this film was made from a script that was originally written well before the stem-cell controversy. Also, Sean Bean's character is not as morally significant to this universe as he believes he is because he can't make people as immortal as he says he can. He's just a glorified mad scientist organ harvester, and there's a point with many diseases beyond where a single organ replacement can save a life anyway.
As for the film itself, while the action is great, considering the quality of the cast, the acting is a little subpar. Ewan MaGregor has the challenge of playing two people interacting in conversation (like Nicholas Cage did in Adaptation, a role that earned him an Oscar nomination) and I applaud him for that, but with the exception of Sean Bean, I don't really feel like anyone gave a remotely memorable performance. I came to greatly appreciate the visual look of this universe, and I think that sci-fi films are heavily dependent on visual feel.